LG beats Apple to touch-screen mobileLG releases own model months before the iPhone

LG Electronics has introduced a smartphone without buttons months before Apple's iPhone is due to hit the market.

The LG Prada was developed with fashion house Prada to be a slim and elegant fashion phone. It has a single touch-screen, 2-megapixel camera and is just 12mm thick.

First Pictures of the LG Prada Phone

"LG and Prada have worked together seamlessly towards a shared vision to develop one of the most beautifully stylish handsets the market has ever seen," said Dr Scott Ahn, president of LG Electronics.

In developing the phone LG contributed the internal electronics and hardware, while Prada developed the touch screen interface, exterior styling and a host of accessories for the fashion conscious.

"As we do with ready-to-wear and accessories, we were looking at a breakthrough," said Patrizio Bertelli, president of Prada.

"Consistent with our approach, we are not branding an existing product; rather we have been working with LG to give this new phone a very strong character and unique style, both in its content and in its design."

The phone is icon-based for control but the screen shuts down to conserve power when not in use and presents a uniformly black exterior. The handset will be available next month at a cost of €600.

Actully, LG KE850 was given to the IF design foundation last month, before iPhone was announced, so obviously they have been working on it from quite some time. Touchscreen phones are available from a long time, it was obvious someone would come with a phone without keypad sometime anyway

It could be that LG is the OEM for Apple iPhone. The UI of KE850 is based on flash so it's not hard to make a program for it, provided that Adobe Flex is now available too.

The Prada model will be prices at 600 euro. Normal model will be priced lower

iphone ripoff just within a week of unveiling of the phone at macworld , dumb thought. Products are not created in a week, its long term planning. Its not like LG saw the iphone in macworld and quickly made a cpoy. And they are releasing it before the iphone means that they were working on it from a long time and so was apple, and i am sure there are many other companies which have such undergoing projects . And the iphone concept is not entirely revolutionary , I saw the keynote speech of Mr Jobs and he was using too much adjectives to describe the phone as it is the most revolutionary product of the decade , its a very good product and i want one but these type of products are already in use and very popular in Japan. May be iphone is superior to all the existing of the similar type, but its not entirely new concept. The looks of a all touchscreen phone totally depend on the GUI and apple makes one of the best.

Unless one actually handles a phone, I fail to understand how one can deduce whether a handset is durable or not.

LG has had well designed phones from a long time now. However, the UI of LG phones is horrible. It's even clumsier than Motorola's UI. It'll be interesting to see whether LG can improve upon the UI of their phones, as currently, that's the weakest part of their phones.

Features like AJAX, favicons, auto complete and RSS support excite me. We'll have to wait till June to know about the full feature set of iPhone's Safari.

I think for the iPhone to be successful, Apple needs to enable 3rd-party application support. Unless they do that, I'm not going to buy the iPhone. But, I hope by the time the 2nd-3rd gen iPhone comes out, Apple will enable third party developers to develop apps for the iPhone. At the moment, that is the biggest drawback.

it's better to wait before u come to any conclusion. iPhone is very thing, we have no idea how durable it is, while LG KE850 looks far sturdier

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OK, so thicker products are more durable than those that are comparatively thinner. So, floppies are more durable than CDs/DVDs - and headphones are more durable than earphones!

BTW, the Apple iPhone is 11.6 mm thin and the LG Prada, at 12 mm thin, is no heavy-weight either. So, according to you, a phone that is 12 mm thin should be more durable than one that is only 11.6 mm thin?
Well, I have an advice for future buyers of the iPhone. After you have bought the device, take it out of the box and stick a one-inch thick slab of wood onto its rear portion (leave space for the camera though). And lo, you have the most durable mobile phone ever!

Two sparsely-buttoned large, touchscreen phones: the Apple iPhone, and the LG KE850 (which already won the International Forum Design Product Design Award for 2007). Separated at birth, or possible lawsuit number two for Apple? You decide. - Engaget